In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change their views about issues of personal as well as public interest. Discourse analysts have deemed concessions as privileged strategies to manage disagreement and reach consensus. However, a coherent and comprehensive account of the argumentative functions played by different concessive relations is lacking: do concessions always bear an argumentative role? By which semantic and pragmatic properties? What type of argumentative moves do they instantiate? To answer these questions, we propose a corpus-based study of lexical markers of concessions in the subreddit Changemyview. Drawing from a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation, polysemous markers with contrast are disambiguated, and an empirically motivated typology of concessive relations is proposed. The results of the analysis highlight two types of concessions that are specialized in introducing and/or preventing counterarguments.
AnscombreJCDucrotO (1977) Deux mais en français?Lingua43(1): 23–40.
2.
AntakiCWetherellM (1999) Show concessions. Discourse Studies1: 7–27.
3.
AzarM (1997) Concession relations as argumentation. Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse17(3): 301–316.
4.
BlakemoreD (1989) Denial and contrast: A relevance theoretic analysis of but. Linguistics and Philosophy12(1): 15–37.
5.
Couper-KuhlenEThompsonSA (2000a) A linguistic practice for retracting overstatements: ‘Concessive repair’. In: HakulinenASeltingM (eds) Syntax and Lexis in Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 257–288.
6.
Couper-KuhlenEThompsonSA (2000b) Concessive patterns in conversation. Topics in English Linguistics33: 381–410.
7.
Couper-KuhlenEThompsonSA (2005) A linguistic practice for retracting. Syntax and Lexis in Conversation: Studies on the Use of Linguistic Resources in Talk-in-interaction17: 257–288.
8.
CrevelsM (2000) Concessives on different semantic levels: A typological perspective. Topics in English Linguistics33: 313–340.
9.
DavidsonD (1973) On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. American Philosophical Association Centennial Series47: 5–20.
10.
FreemanJB (2000) What types of statements are there?Argumentation14(2): 135–157.
11.
FreemanJB (2011) Argument Structure: Representation and Theory (Vol. 18). Berlin: Springer.
12.
GroteBLenkeNStedeM (1997) Ma (r) king concessions in English and German. Discourse Processes24(1): 87–117.
13.
HallidayMHHasanSR (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
14.
HylandK (2005) Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies7(2): 173–192.
15.
IzutsuMN (2008) Contrast, concessive, and corrective: Toward a comprehensive study of opposition relations. Journal of Pragmatics40(4): 646–675.
16.
KarttunenLPetersS (1979) Conventional implicature. In: OhCDinneenD (eds) Syntax and Semantics 11: Presupposition. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–56.
17.
KönigE (1988) Concessive connectives and concessive sentences: Cross-linguistic regularities and pragmatic principles. In: HawkinsJ (ed.) Explaining Language Universals. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 145–166.
18.
LakoffG (1971) The role of deduction in grammar. In: FillmoreCLangendoenD (eds) Studies in Linguistics Semantics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 108–112.
19.
LevinsonSC (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20.
MannWCThompsonSA (1988) Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse8(3): 243–281.
21.
MoeschlerJSpenglerND (1982) La concession ou la réfutation interdite. Cahiers De Linguistique Française4: 7–36.
22.
PerelmanCOlbrechts-TytecaL (1969) The New Rhetoric. Paris: Notre Dame Press.
23.
PrasadRWebberBJoshiA (2014) Reflections on the Penn Discourse Treebank, comparable corpora and complementary annotation. Computational Linguistics40(4): 921–950.
24.
QuirkR (1954) The Concessive Relation in Old English Poetry (Yale studies in English 124). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
25.
RudolphE (1996) Contrast: Adversative and Concessive Relations and Their Expressions in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese on Sentence and Text Level (Vol. 23). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
26.
TaboadaM (2006) Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations. Journal of Pragmatics38(4): 567–592.
27.
TanCNiculaeVDanescu-Niculescu-MizilCet al. (2016) Winning arguments: Interaction dynamics and persuasion strategies in good-faith online discussions. In: Proceedings of the 25th international conference on world wide web, Montreal, QC, Canada, 11–15 April, pp. 613–624. Geneva: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.
28.
UzelgunMAMohammedDLewińskiMet al. (2015) Managing disagreement through yes, but… constructions: An argumentative analysis. Discourse Studies17(4): 467–484.
29.
Van EemerenFHGrootendorstR (2004) A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach (Vol. 14). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30.
Van EemerenFHGrootendorstRJohnsonRHet al. (2013) Fundamentals of argumentation theory: A handbook of historical backgrounds and contemporary developments. Amsterdam: Routledge.
31.
Van EemerenFHHoutlosserPHenkemansAS (2007) Argumentative Indicators in Discourse: A Pragma-dialectical Study (Vol. 12). Amsterdam: Springer.
32.
WaltonDN (1989) Dialogue theory for critical thinking. Argumentation3(2): 169–184.
